Notes for the week: the Optimist; Ken Burns on John McCain; one nation's non-free press; foreign collusion; August primaries; alleged papal complicity; coming soon to your area; DJT and religion; the opera, Doctor Atomic; Judge Kavanaugh; child labor; more beaver news; young voters.

Optimist, 2 September. Link here.Smile for the goat, marriage after death, and other stories.

Ken Burns on John McCain. It is fitting that America's premier living story teller have a last say about his conversations with McCain as Burns put together his epic about the Vietnam era. McCain was insistent that the story include those of ordinary Americans and Vietnamese, South and North, and was gratified that Burns agreed. He even suggested that his story be left out completely, which, of course, did not happen.
     I personally feel that McCain's most shining moment was when he respectfully told his North Vietnamese captors that he could not accept their offer of early release, that to do so would dishonor his fellow POWs. Indeed, one still living senior (then North) Vietnamese official has said (after McCain's death) that that momentous refusal was something for which he had always admired McCain.

Eritrea without a free press. When President Trump inveighs against the main stream media, some wonder.....  Salem Solomon's story about Eritrea's "news desert" is instructive. Even in our much longer-established nation, a free, unfettered, disputed press is a cornerstone of democracy.

Foreign influence and U.S. government. As American as apple pie? Jeremi Suri thinks the influence of foreign governments has a long history in America. The Trump campaign may have been brazen, but it was hardly new.
     "George Washington contended with French meddling from Edmond-Charles “Citizen” Genêt, Abraham Lincoln struggled to block British subsidies to the Confederacy, and 20th-century presidents policed foreign agents promoting their country’s goals to American audiences."
     Richard Nixon profited from money funneled from Chinese-born American socialite, Anna Chennault (ties to Taiwan, home of the then Nationalist Chinese government).

August primary races. The respected Cook Political Report says that only 66 U.S. House races will be competitive in November; that is a mere 15% that might change. In the Senate, of the 36 seats in contention, only 7 races are considered toss ups, 2 of which are open due to retirement.
     No wonder your senator and/or representative may seem a bit aloof, less than energized to do an Aussie walkabout, ringing doorbells.

Immigration. Interestingly, on the policy front, John McCain's death brought forth numerous columns (here is one) about immigration, highlighting his past bi-partisan efforts to write legislation that in the end proved fruitless given the two irreconcilable immigration issues: avoiding mass deportations and finding a legal path to citizenship.
     The administration's mantra now, of course, is "build that wall!" Once again the president's ignorance of history shines brightly. He forgets (if he ever knew) that the Soviet Union built the Berlin Wall -- complete with tank traps, death strips, land mines, triple-strand barbed wire, machine gun turrets, dogs, and well indoctrinated marksmen -- and it failed. Not due to the urging of the once Republican beloved Ronald Regan, but by political and economic forces beyond Soviet control. Will President Trump put (convicted) AZ Sheriff Joe Arpaio in charge of his southern gun towers?

Papal complicity. Columnists Marc Thiessen and Michael Gerson discuss the ongoing news of pedophilia in the Roman Catholic church. Thiessen says, "Suddenly I understand how the Reformation happened." The letter of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò alleges that the knowledge extended into the Vatican. Thiessen likens Viganò's latter to Luther's "95 Theses".

McCain and Trump. National Hero (5 1/2 years in the Hanoi Hilton and National Coward (what with 5 bone-spur draft deferments and avoiding STDs “I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”). I had high school cross country runners who insisted on competing while treating their bone-spurs.

Firestorm coming soon. As Ruxandra Guidi notes, the "new normal" of firestorms may soon visit your area. "Yet there’s nothing supernatural about these phenomena...are of our own making. They’re the accidental yet catastrophic side effects of the way we live our lives; witness the rim of a flat tire scraped the asphalt on a highway, causing the sparks...people moving into fire-prone areas, along with forestry practices that suppress natural fires and human-caused global warming." CA Governor Jerry Brown has talked about his state-wide problem that is not going to go away. 
     Ask, how prepared are you for a quick home evacuation -- no matter the cause? Consider, "Are we ready for our climate future — now?"


Religion and November 2018. In "This is the new GOP," Columnist Michael Gerson talks about the President's recent appeal to evangelical leaders, his naked appraisal that the upcoming election amounts to a "referendum on your religion." Gerson went on,

Fighting for Trump, the president argued, is the only way to defend the Christian faith. None of these men and women of God, apparently, gagged on their hors d’oeuvres. 'It’s not a question of like or dislike, it’s a question that [Democrats] will overturn everything that we’ve done, and they will do it quickly and violently. And violently.' Christians, evidently, need to start taking “Onward, Christian Soldiers” more literally....This is now what passes for GOP discourse — the cultivation of anger, fear, grievances, prejudices and hatreds.

Doctor Atomic.  This past August Santa Fe's well-known outdoor opera was the venue for the first NM production of Doctor Atomic, the story of Los Alamos and the scientists who created the atomic bomb. (The opera had been previously produced before in New York and San Francisco.)
      However, this was the first time that downwinders — people whose families lived in NM's Tularosa Basin, in the path of the bomb’s radiation — have ever appeared on stage during a performance. The article notes that "[i]n 1945, thousands of people lived in a 50-mile radius of the test site." One downwinder, Frank Gallegos, says, “The government didn’t tell them nothing.”
    Most Trinity downwinders are not covered by the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which provides for those who lived in parts of NV, UT, and AZ while 100 above-ground atomic tests were detonated at the much-used NV site.
It is likely that most Americans do not know that the bomb was actually first tested in the United States, not long before sunrise, 0530 on 16 July 1945 at the Trinity site in NM's Tularosa Basin. Nor that the test occurred a mere 22 days before a second bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. (Nagasaki was destroyed three days later, 9 August.) The public can visit the Trinity site on the first Saturday in April and October.

George Will on Kavanaugh. George Will poses some last questions for the nominee. How do you get a nominee to a nominee's philosophy without asking questions he will not discuss hypothetical "what if-s" about today's questions? Segregation in the public schools is not a closed issue; for many 2018 reasons, city' school systems are quite segregated. Therefore, for example, Will poses, "The 1866 Congress that drafted the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the law” continued to fund racially segregated schools in the District of Columbia, which Congress controlled. Yet the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education held that segregation violated that guarantee. Can originalists defend the court’s reasoning in Brown? How might the court have better reached the Brown result?"
     Other then vs now issues:

• the 14th Amendment's prohibition of sodomy; 
• the 8th amendment and cruel and unusual punishment at a time when "branding, pillorying, whipping and mutilation were permitted. "Would originalism allow these?" 
• "Can the meaning of words be severed from the intentions of those who use them?"
• "Do you believe that the Constitution’s authors intended their words to advance what the Declaration began — the securing of natural rights?"
• Justice Thomas said, “We as a nation adopted a written Constitution precisely because it has a fixed meaning that does not change.” "Can you cite an important constitutional provision (certainly not the regulation of interstate commerce, or the establishment of religion, or government taking private property for 'public use,' or the prohibition of 'cruel and unusual punishments,' the meaning of which today is the same as the public meaning when the provision was ratified?

It is doubtful, though, that so rigorously intellectual questions will be asked, though hope springs eternal. More likely, asserts Ruth Marcus there will be the "kabuki dance" (then Senator Biden, 2005) or a "vapid, shallow charade" (then law professor, now Associate Justice, Elana Kagan, 1995).

Child Labor. Appropriately on Labor Day, there was this Washington Post story about Lewis Hines' "searing" photographs that showed the world when, where, how children were forced to work. He told owners he was a "humble Bible salesman ...who wanted to spread the good word to the laborers inside." Or a post card salesman or a machinery photographer. Whatever would get him inside. The unions of the day did little to protect child laborers. "The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that around the turn of the century, at least 18 percent of children between the ages of 10 and 15 were employed."
     The story notes that "Today, the Library of Congress maintains a collection of more than 5,000 of Hine’s photographs, including the thousands he took for the National Child Labor Committee, known as the NCLC."
     The story of Hines' early hard-scrabble life is, in itself, a story of "moving on up."

Laborers on Labor Day. E.J. Dionne wonders, "Two Labor Days into Donald Trump’s presidency, what has happened to the working class?" Overall, not much has improved. In fact, "[A]ccording to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, real hourly wages overall dropped between July 2017 and July 2018, and they dropped for mid-wage workers, too." That's not a statistic the President brags about at his rallies. 

     What seems to be increasingly undeniable is that the President's "base" is ever more based on mere personality,  a base willing to cheer even when there are no provable personal gains. His smiling, self-satisfied smirk has somehow come to be a reflection of their own feelings. Dionne: "Watch the typical Trump stump speech, and you will find that fear-mongering smothers any uplift and that falsehoods about immigrants outnumber truths about the challenges to middle-class living standards."

     This is scary. It is so hauntingly like Hitler's base in the 1930s: the German population wildly supported him even he moved towards war, their country became increasingly less free, and belts were tightened for a conflict they were sure could be avoided. Der Fürher would surely not lead the nation to war. Hitler's rallies were a continual source -- and proof -- of strength for the Nazi regime. (See Julia Boyd, Travelers in the Third Reich, her "Afterwards," and the discussion of how even seasoned travelers were so easily misled.)

Beavers and water in the west. This HCN article discusses how these industrious little critters "make the desert bloom." James Rogers, the manager of the nearly 1M acre Winecup Gamble ranch in NV, put a halt to his cowboys' indiscriminate shooting of beavers. He says, “I’m always looking for ways to keep water here, and the beaver do it for free. They don’t do it perfectly, but who am I to think that I can do it better?”  Along the Thousand Springs Creek, "....the string of ponds soaked into the soil...raised the water table, sub-irrigating pastures in one of the driest corners of North America."

Golden, CO, and the vote. Students at Golden High School have pushed the town fathers, and so town voters are being asked if the Golden should lower the voting age to 16? While CO mandates 18, Golden is a "home rule" city and can lower the age for city-related issues and offices.
     The idea of allowing 16 year-olds to vote in school board elections was recently discussed in Boulder, CO, but not acted upon. In 2013, newly enfranchised 16-17 year-old voters in Takoma Park, MD, turned out at at 4 times the rate of those 18 and up.

Thank you for reading. I hope your Labor Day weekend went well.